Techno Cop

  I recently had the chance to play an early ultra-violent game for the Sega Genesis.  This game is freely available to play on PC due to advances in emulation.

   Techno Cop is a 1990 action video game released for Sega Genesis. The gameplay combines pseudo-3D driving in the graphical style of Outrun with side-scrolling action as the player controls a police officer driving to and then moved through various seedy locations in a one-man war against crime. The game was the first game on the Genesis to have a warning label due to its violent content.
The game was largely panned by video game critics for its simplistic graphics, sound, and the fact that many of the levels looked too similar.

Gameplay

  In the single-player side-scrolling game the player is a cop in a seedy futuristic urban city. Armed with a pistol, the player has to kill various thugs, before the timer runs out. While the game has several levels, the background in the game does not change often.
The other half of the game is a driving sequence, similar to other computer games such as Roadblasters.
Techno Cop was one of the first games made for the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis from a third party developer and was part of an attempt by Razorsoft to test what sort of content would Sega allow on a game made for one of its systems.

Violent Content

  Both Nintendo of America and Sega of America insisted upon previewing games made for their system, prior to release, to check for bugs and potentially controversial or offensive content. Sega allowed Techno Cop to be released without requiring Razor Soft to remove or tone down the game's violent content. Along with the blood, when the playable character shot at another character, they would be blown apart.